Laura Kaplan Shanley

Welcome to UnassistedChildbirth.com. This site is based on the belief that childbirth is inherently safe and relatively painless provided we don’t live in poverty, and do not interfere either physically or psychologically.

Drugs, machinery, and medical personnel are not only unnecessary in most cases, they are also no match for a woman’s own intellect and intuition. Birth is sexual and spiritual, magical and miraculous – but not when it’s managed, controlled, and manipulated by the medical establishment, or hindered by the mother’s own mind.

In the articles and stories on this site I hope to present a new way of looking at birth, and ultimately, at life. Childbirth is a gift to be enjoyed not a curse to be endured. The time has come for us to cast off our doubts and fears, and learn to believe in our own abilities. What better place to start than with the birth of a baby?

If you have found this website helpful, please feel free to leave a donation to help keep Unassisted Childbirth up & running for many more years to come. Thank you so much!

How to Create the Birth of Your Dreams: My thoughts summed up in 20 minutes

Here are my top ten ideas about how to create the birth of your dreams! I talk about my own births, the research I did while pregnant with my first child and while writing my book, Unassisted Childbirth, and what I have learned since then.

My Book: Unassisted Childbirth

Someday women will not give birth in hospitals because they will realize that childbirth is not a disease. They will not pay physicians thousands of dollars to probe them and cut them and tell them what to do. They will not submit themselves to IVs, fetal monitors, vaginal examinations, or Cesarean sections. Nor will they take the hospitals into their homes, bringing there the well-meaning substitute doctors – the midwives – with their sterilized instruments, rubber gloves, and breathing techniques. For, none of this will be necessary.

Instead, like their animal sisters, women will someday deliver their own babies peacefully and painlessly at home. Women will understand that birth is only dangerous and painful for those who believe it is.

Someday, both women and men will understand that childbirth (and every other event in their lives) is the result of their individual beliefs. They will no longer listen to the voices of officialdom telling them that their lives are beyond their self-conscious control. They will listen instead to the inner authority saying, “Your life is your own creation. Believe in yourself and you have nothing to fear.” My goal in writing this book is to help make that someday today.

My Interview with Bob Berkowitz

Clio's Unassisted Birth of Lucien

MEET Laura Shanley

Since we did not live in poverty, did not choose to invite medical professionals to our births, and had worked with ourselves to eliminate fear and other potentially destructive emotions, we knew that unassisted childbirth was the safest way for us to give birth.

Unassisted Childbirth

In an unassisted childbirth no one acts as a midwife. Instead, the birthing woman herself determines the course of her labor. Partners or friends may participate to varying degrees, but no one instructs the woman as to how to give birth, when to push, what position to be in, etc.